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Child

Child — Descent Press Index (entry forthcoming).

Jae Botávn

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Child
  1. Etymology

Child (as archetype) names an image of both irrecoverable past and anticipated futurebeginning and end, pre-conscious and post-conscious essence. Related: puer aeternus; divine child; abandonment; wholeness.

  1. Plain summary

The child archetype is not only nostalgia for childhood. Jung treats it as beginning and end at once: earliest unconscious state and an analogy for what comes after ordinary ego-life—an image of psychic wholeness.

Feelings of alienation can constellate it as “poor me regression and as desperate freedom from the past—the positive divine-child side. Abandonment and peril mark insignificant beginnings and miraculous birth: the emergence of a new content when consciousness sees no third way. The child evolves toward independence and must detach from origins. Related to puer aeternus, senex, and individuation.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common child-archetype figures and motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):

beginning and end / initial and terminal creature; pre-conscious and post-conscious essence; anticipation of life after death; psychic wholeness; alienation/abandonment constellating archetype; poor-me” regression vs divine-child freedom; insignificant beginnings / mysterious miraculous birth; creative emergence of new content; agonizing conflict / tertium non datur; evolving toward independence; detachment from origins / abandonment as necessary; puer aeternus as child-archetype form; divine boy / senex polarity; mandala / wholeness; dreams of the child; active imagination; god-image nascent saviour.

  1. Academic elucidation

  1. Lexicon

Sharp (1991)

Child. Psychologically, an image of both the irrecoverable past and an anticipation of future development. … The child is … both beginning and end, an initial and a terminal creature. … the pre-conscious and the post-conscious essence of man. … “Child” means something evolving towards independence. This it cannot do without detaching itself from its origins: abandonment is therefore a necessary condition…

(Sharp, 1991, p. [provisional — unverified])

  1. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive
Statements like “The child motif is a vestigial memory of ones own childhood” and similar explanations merely beg the question “The child motif is a picture of certain forgotten things in our childhood”…

The child motif represents not only something that existed in the distant past but also something that exists now; that is to say, it is not just a vestige but a system functioning in the present whose purpose is to compensate or correct… the inevitable one-sidednesses and extravagances of the conscious mind.

One of the essential features of the child motif is its futurity. The child is potential future. Hence the occurrence of the child motif in the psychology of the individual signifies as a rule an anticipation of future developments…

See also: puer aeternus; senex; wise old man; individuation; archetype; self; god-image; dreams; mandala; mana-personality. (Queued — not yet linked: wholeness, incest.)

References

Jung, C. G. (1968). The psychology of the child archetype. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 9, pt. 1, pp. 161–162, 164, ¶¶273, 276, 278). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1940)

Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.

Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.

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